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NVIDIA snaps up physics processing company Ageia

NVIDIA announced its intent to buy physics processor company Ageia today and …

NVIDIA announced today that it will acquire physics processing company Ageia, with the goal of integrating the company's technology into future NVIDIA products. Ageia has struggled to become relevant since the company was formed in 2002, and the company's PhysX processor (or PPU) has been a solution in search of a problem ever since the company released its first line of PhysX products.

To date, the company has had only a handful of major SDK wins, though scoring the PlayStation 3 was a major one. Actual PhysX cards, while often included on ultra-high-end boutique systems, have only been supported in a handful of games. The launch of Unreal Tournament 3 and its support for Physx hardware was meant to mark a major victory for Ageia—the company cut prices on the PhysX line to stimulate demand—but disappointingUT3 sales numbers probably did little to boost PPU sales.

An NVIDIA acquisition, however, changes the company's situation considerably. If NVIDIA makes good on its goal of integrating PhysX processing into future GPUs, Ageia gains the one thing the company has sought since its incorporation six years ago—a userbase. NVIDIA, meanwhile, could push developers to include PhysX support as one aspect of its "The Way It's Meant to be Played" campaign, while simultaneously negating the need to develop new and improved GPU-based physics to compete with discrete physics processing solutions.

According to our own Jon Stokes, the current PhysX PPU is probably a multicore solution that Ageia may have intended to launch into the high-performance computing market once the product was selling into the gaming market in sufficient quantities to take advantage of economy-of-scale production. NVIDIA's acquisition of the company may change some of these initiatves, but it's possible that NVIDIA intends to use PhysX-based technology to sweeten its future offerings in both gaming and stream computing markets.

AMD, meanwhile, appears to be the odd man out as far as physics technology is concerned. It's far too early to predict how much of a difference this will make, especially since NVIDIA and AMD are tied together on a number of fronts, but ATI may face competition on new fronts once NVIDIA finishes integrating PhysX technology into its GPUs. Overall, the acquisition should be a positive development for anyone wanting to see games adopt and feature more realistic physics engines—but exactly how that will happen (and how long it will take) is still open to speculation.